Photos nab international smugglers

By PATRICK GOWER

They didn't know it, but the four Czechs were being watched from the instant they arrived at Auckland Airport.

Customs officers rifled through their baggage looking for any clue.

And there it was, a thin hand-made book full of colour photographs of New Zealand native orchids, downloaded from the internet.

Agents were assigned to secretly follow the Czechs as they toured the country for three weeks during January.

They were followed into dense bush near Fiordland and secretly photographed plucking plants and stuffing them into bundles of newspapers.


The extraordinary surveillance operation was mounted not on drug dealers or terrorists but on a university professor, his botanist wife, a government environmental inspector and a council officer, both also botanists.

The agents were from the Wildlife Enforcement Group, a joint unit of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Customs and the Department of Conservation set up 10 years ago.

When the Czechs returned to Auckland Airport for their flight home on Sunday, January 18, the agents pounced, seizing their baggage.

The bundles of newspaper spotted in the bush were full of hundreds of samples of grasses and plants.

Waiting with the agents was botanist Rebecca Stanley from the Department of Conservation.

While they interviewed the Czechs, showing them the photos of them in the bush and scouring their diaries for evidence of their travels, Stanley worked to identify their plants.

She found orchids. Orchids are protected internationally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, making it virtually impossible to export or trade plants from the wild.

The Wildlife Enforcement team found 40 orchid plants in the baggage of Cestmir Cihalik and his wife, Jarmila Cihalikova.

Most were dead; two clumps hidden inside collapsible camping pots and a sleeping bag hood were still alive and wrapped in a handkerchief.

The agents found another 43 orchids on Jindrich Smitak, the bespectacled environmental inspector with the sunburned face. He, too, had clumps of orchids hidden in his camping pots.

Petr Janda was carrying grasses and sedge, and although some may have come from national parks - and therefore were against the law to take - Stanley did not have time to identify them.


Without any proof, Cihalikova and Janda were allowed to go.

Yesterday, Cihalik and Smitak were fined $7500.

The 54-year-old Cihalik heads a medical school at 430-year-old Palacky university in the mediaeval town of Olomouc.

Smitak, 60, works at the Czech environmental inspection agency.

Their arrest and trial in New Zealand was well-publicised at home.

A columnist in the Czech national daily newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes thundered they were victims of "New Zealand's green hysteria", comparing it to the Nazi and communist regimes.

In an interview with the Weekend Herald, Cihalik and Smitak said they were not "thieves", implying it was all a misunderstanding.

Cihalik said they had not just been here for plants "but for all the nature".

"We just want you to stop calling us thieves and smugglers," Cihalik said. "We are Czech botanists."

The Wildlife Enforcement Group has caught people smuggling native geckos, beetles, birds and eggs.

Now a clump of Earina Autumnalis - the heavily scented 'Easter Orchid' - seized from the Czechs has burst into flower in its Auckland office after careful watering by spokesman Col Hitchcock.

Hitchcock says the group has long been aware that rare orchids can fetch up to $25,000 overseas.

He speaks of a worldwide trend of holidaying central European academics with "hidden agendas".

So an approach by the Czechs through the proper channels to come and take plants rang alarm bells.

These intensified when they didn't reply to authorities and came to New Zealand anyway.

Hitchcock is sure the Czechs knew what they were doing was wrong.

Their luggage contained computer printouts of the New Zealand laws under which they were later charged.

An unnamed university colleague of Cihalik told the Czech media: "He is a nice person and a very respectable man, but once he sees the orchid it is as if he has fog in front of his eyes."

New Zealand has some of the world's rarest orchids, and Hitchcock says "the Euros have been down here chasing them".

He is glad the Czechs have been complaining of their arrest in New Zealand.

"We don't want to be put on some orchid map of easybeats."